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album review

“While there are many bands in the hard rock/metal world that like to play with fire, it requires a certain combination of insanity and balls to douse yourself in it.” This opening line of Psychothermia’s biography from the band’s website is certainly true, but if you’re going to play with real fire during a photo shoot, you better have the music to back up these incredibly unique and powerful images.

Melodic death metal is one of those things that, if you listen to a purist, will tell you cannot exist. Death metal, they say, is incompatible with the melodic elements other facets of the metal universe take for granted. The music should be uncompromising, focused on nothing but steamrolling the listener with riff after riff of unrelenting brutality. The bands that dared step outside that box and try to make their assaults into what conventional thinkers might consider songs were heretics, and the music they made was cute, but not really death metal.

In many ways, nothing has changed in all the years rock music has been around. Especially in the world of progressive rock, the past is the past, the present, and the future. Several generations of bands have arisen in the wake of the originators, recreating the sounds they grew up loving, all the while many of the first wave of prog rock bands continued to soldier on, making the music that at one time was cutting edge. Focus is one of those bands who have survived, in one form or another, to serve as an elder statesman of prog.

Red Bull has done a phenomenal job of making their name synonymous with “energy” and with Red Bull Records, energy is exactly what listeners receive. Watch five videos of people doing something “extreme” and the odds of one of them using Awolnation’s “Sail” as the soundtrack, which was also released by Red Bull Records, are exceptionally high.

Cults are bad things, or so we are told. The connotation that comes packaged with the word is one of evil, the occult, and brainwashed minions blindly following their leader. In that last respect, there is a grain of truth to the attachment of that word to certain bands, the ones who inspire a fan-base supremely devoted to their favorite artist. Slough Feg is certainly a cult band, if we put it in those terms.

When entering blindly into an album, the descriptions we use to categorize the music we hear aren't always good enough. Specifically, when we talk about doom metal, we neglect to mention that there are two radically different approaches to doom, a forked road that may take us to the promised land, but may also take us directly to hell. On the one hand, we have the doom bands that treat doom as the icing on the cake, spending most of their time playing a hybrid of traditional and stoner metal, merely a bit slower than usual.

Texas hardly seems like a hotbed for progressive or technical death metal, but rising from the Lone Star State is Vex, a band that would sound more at home among the ranks of Darkthrone or Absu than Pantera. Their newest release, “Memorious” attempts to bridge the difficult gulf between the distanced ideals of both death and prog as we commonly know them.

One of the sad facts about music is that there is simply too much of it. There's too much for us, as fans, to be able to hear even a fraction of what's out there (trust me, I hear more than my fair share, and even that is a mere pittance compared to what is released) in our quest to find the next album that will speak to us on untold levels. The same is true for musicians, for whom there is too much music to compete against for their work to stand much of a chance of reaching the people to whom that music would speak on those levels.

As a reviewer, when you listen to an album, you are invariably struck with a first impression. It’s impossible not to be, as this kind of reactionary assessment is simply part of human nature. The need for thoroughness typically prevails however, and you end up listening to the album again, attempting to attach your first impression to the lathe and hone it down to something that isn’t a cumbersome generality.